Grubbing into the lives of small-town sexual delinquents of all ages has
been a tempting novelistic idea ever since Peyton Place. Lanham adds an
overlay of Big Ideas (religion, tradition, history) but is careful to
provide the full familiar stock company: the nymphomaniac who gives
strip parties and records the livelier moments on Polaroid film, the
budding teen-age sexpot, the aging Don Juan, the middle-aged mother who
has never responded to a man, the impotent bridegroom, the spinster who
had an abortion in her youth. At one point the...